Modern wind and solar farms require huge swaths of land. Giant windmills, for instance, get spaced a half-mile apart or more. Since “density is green,” this lowers their “green credentials,” while making compact modern natural gas plants, for instance, more environmentally sound. The 550 MW Topaz Solar Farm in California occupies 4,600 football fields worth of land. In contrast, the state’s 850 MW gas-powered Delta Energy Center takes up about 15 football fields (20 acres). These unintended consequences of renewables can’t be ignored. Harvard study: “Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant warming.”

This spacing issue for wind and solar coincides with their underreported “sweet spot problem.” Not all locations have the same prospects for renewables, justifying why wind-deprived southeastern states haven't installed Renewable Portfolio Standards. The Midwest, for instance, is great for wind but building the hundreds of miles of high-voltage power lines to connect distant consuming areas has proven as difficult and costly as it sounds.

Ultimately, the number of places to put a big wind and solar farm is finite, which is why the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) actually projects that gas will add nearly 10 times more generation capacity than wind and 34% more than solar additions in the decades ahead. With prospects based on geography, it’s as obvious as you think: wind and solar builds will be forced to flatten out at some point.

Intermittency

The reality is that wind and solar power are usually only available some 30% of the time, as DOE shows. California’s giant Alta Wind Energy Center, for instance, has an average capacity factor of just 24%, meaning that 76% of the time it is not producing the electricity that it could be. It is typically a peaking natural gas plant that compensates for the intermittency of Mother Nature. In fact, this gas backup is an added practical cost (from both a money and environmental perspective) for wind and solar that usually doesn’t get factored into their cost analysis, making them appear cheaper in studies than reality ultimately proves out.

Now we know that storage batteries are advancing to help this intermittency problem for wind and solar, but large-scale batteries have been promised to us for decades. MIT Technology Review puts it bluntly: batteries are “far too expensive to play a major role.” And remember that wind and solar are strictly sources of electricity, meaning that they only compete in ~40% of our total energy demand market.

It never gets mentioned that 6 in every 7 humans alive today live in undeveloped nations, lacking proper access to the reliable and affordable energy needed to growth their economies. The sad unintended consequence of the focus only on climate is that it has made life-shortening “energy poverty” a forgotten calamity. Half of the world or more doesn’t have proper access to electricity, the foundation of a modern society. Nearly 17,300 children die each day from preventable causes, enabled by a lack of energy. Tragically, all of this has now become an afterthought.

As opposed to some grand “Koch conspiracy,” there are both cost and physical explanations for why wind and solar account for only 3% of global energy supply. The World Bank, International Energy Agency, and other leaders have stood opposed to the unfairness of blocking fossil fuels from poor nations, which is why they strongly support major investments in carbon capture.

Sinking Other Investments

Oil and gas supply 60% of the world’s energy, and their ongoing importance is obvious: hundreds of billions of dollars each year are being invested in producing and transporting them. These are some of the leading companies in the world, surely not foolish enough to be investing so heavily in energy development that won’t be needed. Case in point came this past week when Occidental Petroleum’s $57 billion counteroffer to Chevron’s $52 billion bid to buy Anadarko Petroleum. Mutual funds are full of oil and gas companies because they are good investments: “Public pension funds must not divest from reality.”

Oil and gas are not stranded but required assets. Our own DOE has them still supplying over half of U.S. energy through at least 2050. Thus, trying to sink investment in domestic supply will only serve the rest of the nation like it has California (reliance on OPEC oil) and New England (reliance on Russian gas). Not to mention the jobs and huge tax revenues provided for states. The U.S. oil and gas business, for instance, supports 10.3 million jobs: “Support Your Local Oil and Natural Gas Company.”

Fossil Fuel Inputs

It’s truly the ultimate irony of the anti-fossil fuel push. Oil, gas, and coal are so entrenched in our immense energy complex that when you are doing pretty much anything, you are relying on them. To illustrate, petro-chemicals are the building blocks of our clothing, plastics, and thousands of other products that we use every day, ensuring that we will need oil for as far as the eye can see. Even electric cars, which are only selling a few hundred thousand a year (as compared to a U.S. oil-based fleet of 250 million), require lots more gas and coal.